Open information services

The Distributed Link Service [5] provides hypermedia services, layered on top of, but independent of, the underlying document data services provided by the World Wide Web. This model enables enormous flexibility for providing and manipulating links and designing information architectures, but conversely abandons any guarantee of synchronicity between changes in the data layer and the links layer. This paper contrasts this approach to link management with the more generally accepted (and safer) solution of a closed information environment (perhaps in the form of an object-oriented SGML database), and presents an expanded open hypermedia service for the WWW composed of link management together with document management and consistency maintenance tools.